


Fire on the Hills

by dewinter



Series: The Bloody Sire [2]
Category: Dunkirk (2017)
Genre: Angst, Gen, M/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-19
Updated: 2017-08-20
Packaged: 2018-12-17 08:29:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,045
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11847798
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dewinter/pseuds/dewinter
Summary: A few tales of pluck and derring-do. The protagonist the same in every one.*June, 1941. Morningside and Barth, Western Pomerania.





	1. Morningside, June 1941

Collins booked a berth on the West Coast sleeper and arrived at Waverley having wasted only eight hours of his forty-eight hour pass. He'd come through London the night before - picking through the walls of sandbags and cascades of rubble, the city they'd half-saved, at a price with which they were still reckoning. The destruction looked different, up close: from the air, it was almost beautiful. He was north now, though - almost home - and Edinburgh was princely and grey and unscarred, _almost_. The platform was awash with steam and serge as he alighted, and the early morning light struggled through the dirty glass above. Lovers embracing. Clusters of tommies, talking loudly and swinging their packs with little care. 

Fiona was where she’d told him she’d be, in the garbled phone call he’d made from Kings Cross the night before. Underneath the clock, craning her neck. Collins saw her before she saw him: she looked taller, and older. Thinner, probably – they were all thinner, these days – and fiercer. The uniform suited her. Growing up, she was always untidy, a helter-skelter of scraped knees and flyaway hair and socks pushed down to her ankles. Not the neat, handsome woman looking impatiently at her watch, her buttons and her brogues gleaming.

“Corporal Collins,” he said sternly when he was within three feet of her, and she jumped, and squealed, and suddenly there she was again – his little sister, who put frogs in his bed and never ate her crusts and spoiled his dates with Eilidh Fraser by sitting three rows behind them at the Playhouse and chucking fruit pips at his head.

“Al!” she gasped, and he barely had time to drop his pack before her arms were around him. The stiffness leeched out of him – the sleeper was uncomfortable, and noisy, and he had a crick in his neck he’d been carrying around since before Dunkirk. And then there were the deeper, sadder aches, which were there to stay, probably, carved into his bones, but soothed a little by his sister’s embrace and her cheek against his.

She was rooming with three other ATS girls in a bright, clean flat high above the street in Morningside, and she clutched his arm as they hopped from the bus, her eyes shining, beaming at every person who tipped their hat to Collins.

Tea and shortbread, in the bay window. Fragile willow patterned china with a gilded lip. Fiona fixed his, pouring from on high without spilling a drop, and she reminded him so strongly of their mother, the same long, gentle fingers, tapping the teaspoon twice on the side of the cup, that a lump sprang up in his throat. He stood up abruptly, alarmed, and strode to the window. The city below him, hazy and almost beautiful in the weak morning sun, the barrage balloons swaying gently. 

She must have known he was composing himself, for she made a busy show of taking the tray through to the poky galley kitchen, and talked loudly of her classmates at Craigmillar, and her inability to make the lists and lists of code signs stick in her head.

Collins closed his eyes, and let the familiar, humdrum sounds wash over him. Bicycle bells in the street below, a trundling stream of traffic. The tinkle of porcelain in the sink, and his sister’s soft, beloved voice. And absence, where the sounds to which he’d become so inured should have been. Barked, curt orders. Sirens and ack-ack fire. Screaming planes and screaming men. He clenched his fingers around the window-sill.

 _Get away with you, lad,_ the SO’d said when he’d signed his pass. _You need a break – look half-dead on your feet._

The stopping and standing still had made it worse, though. How he’d ever get going again, he didn’t know. Now that he’d been reminded that a world existed between the sky and the base. There were other people – made of flesh and blood and bone and love – going about their lives, struggling with their own hardships and devils. And he was passing ghostly among them, neither part of the world, nor quite melted into air; not quite yet.

His parting from Fiona the next day was dry-eyed, on both sides. He’d told her little of consequence. A few grumbles about his superiors. A few horror stories from the mess hall.

A few tales of pluck and derring-do. The protagonist the same in every one, though he skated over the particulars, and said _this lad,_ and _one of the boys,_ and _this chap -_ carefully, blankly anonymous, to save his throat from closing around Farrier’s name. It all sounded so thrilling and yet so anodyne, and he spent the journey south wrestling with guilt that he’d left her with such an inadequate, dishonest picture of his life, and of the unlikelihood of his future death. He wadded his greatcoat between his shoulder and the smeary carriage window, and watched the north rattle past, taking the real world, and Fiona, and the last good things he knew, away from him.

He slept fitfully in the truck on the way back to base, half-dreaming he was still suspended in the pale clouds above Morningside. It was gone nine before they pulled up in front of the mess. The lights blazed out over the apron, and Pat Fisher was hammering out Tavern in the Town on the battered, beery upright in the corner. _Remember that the best of friends must part. Must part._

Collins paused at the entrance. The same scene a thousand times. Fug of cigarette smoke. Condensation dripping down the windows. Too-hearty laughter and rowdy cursing. The tables sticky with bad ale and a few harried young cadets weaving between them carrying precarious stacks of glasses. The same as before, give or take a few slaughtered boys. A million miles from Morningside. _Oh, dig my grave both wide and deep, wide and deep._ Time to quit the world outside, and re-enter this one, made of death and steel and loss.


	2. Stalag Luft I, Barth, Western Pomerania, June 1941

It was to be the night after next. Thick cloud and sporadic rain forecast, was the word on the radio the lads had stashed in the chapel, inside the altar. Good cover for a breakout, but it might make the going tougher. Swings and roundabouts. Their blood was up, though. The tension couldn’t hold much longer.

Farrier lay awake. The wind was getting up already, rattling the cheap glass in the windows. This was the third camp they’d moved him through, since Oberursel. Each the same, and not. Low, cheap barracks, flanked by watchtowers and encircled by bristling fences. The same food, and the same grim humour to get them through. The same faces, sometimes. _Fancy seeing you here, Jenkins. We must stop meeting like this; people will talk._

Here, though, everything was coated in a fine crust of salt. The wind whipped the spray in from the Baltic, until the huts, less than six months old, were bleached and dry. The salt caught in their hair, and on their tongues, and drifts of pale sand gathered in their quarters, gritty underfoot. _There’s a cure for everything,_ he’d read once. Where, he couldn’t remember. _Salt water; sweat, tears, or the sea._ Plenty of all three to go around, here.

Tunnelling was impossible. It would be a crude operation – improvised wire-cutters, a mad dash to the beach, purloined boats, through the Fischland strait, and across to Malmö or Ystad. Velinski was confident it could be done – and if it happened there were no boats in the cove, they could head for the peninsula itself and scour the villages past the isthmus.

There should have been seven, but Forsyth developed a persistent cough three days before they were due to go, and refused to risk endangering the attempt with his hacking. So they were six – Velinski and his sweet-faced blonde chum Willie, Cobb, a jumpy Pilot Officer called Sykes who was a liability but for his impeccable German, Johnson – and Farrier. Scattered between the huts, all lying awake like him, no doubt, feeling their hearts beat steadily, thinking about the night after next, and what might lie beyond.

A careful balancing act, this waiting. To have enough steel in your belly to _go,_ to cut the wire and run, to bare your back to the watchtowers. And yet not to die from the hoping. There was an odd sleight of hand to fooling your mind that _this_ time, it would come off, and you need no longer imagine home and all that awaited you there. There was no escaping _from_ a place – without first imaging where, and what, and who you might be escaping _to._

Farrier wondered what the others were imagining. He and Willie’d played that game, over a chessboard, when the breakout was still a kernel in Danny’s mind. When those thoughts could still be given voice without fear of cursing the whole endeavour. Willie’d talked about his sister, and about catching the train from Wigan to skate at the Ice Palace. About the meals he’d relish and how he’d take Velinski with him, find him a home at last, when they got back, when the war was over.

Farrier dawdled over his move, and gnawed at the end of his pipe.

“What’ll I do. A good question…see my mother. Nottingham-way. Poor buggers got it bad over that way last month, Jenkins says. Hope she’s still in the old place. Yes, I’d see my mother. Probably clip me round the ear for being fool enough to get myself caught.”

What he didn’t say was that Uxbridge was calling him – that he’d _swim_ to Ystad to get back there. He’d drag himself to the gates with his hair still brittle with salt, his clothes still waterlogged, fling himself down on the apron – feel the sun on his face and see the boys come racing across the field towards him. And Collins would be in the lead, beaming in that rare unguarded way Farrier still remembered. That would be his homecoming, he thought.

There was nothing _but_ time to think, in his travelogue of prisons. Collins appeared often, in the thinking. He’d found it puzzling, to begin with, and a little irritating. And then it was comforting, and finally life-sustaining. Something to take out and prod at and hold close, when the food was crap or his teeth were chattering or another poor kid had bought it hopping the fence. He reasoned that there would be time to pick apart the whys and wherefores of Collins’ hold on his brain, later. Or else, he would be dead, and then there would be no more worrying left to be done.

The worst thoughts lurked in the witching hour. All the ways it might go wrong. Bullet in the back, frozen in the cold bright wash of the spotlight. Dogs on the beach, throat torn out. Gunned down in the bay, or capsized before they reached Sweden. Or he might get back to Blighty and find the country fallen. Or the faces that had kept him sane – gone. Collins might be festering in some pit like this, just like him, marking off wasted days on his bunk with his pocket knife, somewhere deep in the Reich. Or shot down. Or he never made it out of his blasted kite last June. Might be at the bottom of the Channel, nothing but bone, Farrier blissful in his ignorance. These were the worst thoughts.

And one other dogged him during this interminable night: after all the planning, and waiting, he might be caught, alive, and thrown back into this salted wasteland to rot. He knew he could not stand it much longer. At the bottom of it, escaping had little to do with duty, or the honour of the uniform, or disrupting the German war machine. It was about the mind having its limits. He needed to get out, and soon.

He turned onto his side and watched the rain lash the window. The night after next, and this one almost gone. Home almost at his fingertips, though home might be a person, not a place. A calm came over him, and he drifted into sleep, thinking of Collins, of flying with Collins again, of the free, endless sky.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The quote Farrier is thinking of comes from Isak Dinesen/Karen Blixen, “The Deluge at Nordeney” (1934).

**Author's Note:**

> You can find out more about life in the Auxiliary Territorial Service [here](http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ww2peopleswar/categories/c1217/).


End file.
